Genius Energy Mouse Review and Ratings

Editors’ Rating:

Our Verdict:
The Energy Mouse integrates a device-charging power bank into a mobile mouse's body, combining two essential travel gadgets into one. The mouse itself is rather basic, but the merger's worth the asking price. Read More…

What We Liked…

Decent tracking, build quality for the price

Acting as a power bank, charges gadgets quickly from onboard USB port

Integrated battery-level readout

When charging devices, retains some juice for mousing

What We Didn’t…

No shortcut buttons

Rubberized triangle on top gets dirty quickly

Genius Energy Mouse Review

Table of Contents

Introduction & Design

One kind of mobile accessory quickly becoming necessary for every on-the-go business traveler is the portable power pack. Nothing more than a spare battery that you can jack your smartphone or tablet into for recharging away from an AC outlet or computer, these compact life-savers are suddenly everywhere, integrated into plain slabs, into snazzy chassis by the likes of ADATA and others, or even unusual form factors like lipstick-size chargers.

They’re handy and generally cheap, but they present just one downside: You need to keep these portable batteries themselves charged, which means another electrical device to feed and care for. And if you're anything like us, you probably already have a gadget family that takes up enough of your time and attention to keep juiced up.

But what if your portable power pack was also a mouse?

A wireless mobile mouse is an essential carry item for many business travelers and students. They might use it for an alternative to a touch pad for faster productivity work, for more agile presentation giving, or even for sneaking in a little impromptu gaming after hours. And seeing as that mouse needs a battery inside, anyway…why not make it a power pack and cut out another piece of gear to tote around and keep charged?

It’s a good idea, in theory. In fact, it’s one of the better ones cooked up by perennial input-device innovator KYE/Genius, a longtime OEM of PC pointers. In recent years, Genius has made a resurgence as a consumer brand. And in those same last few years, it seems the company has tried merging the stodgy PC mouse with everything practical and impractical. We've seen several generations of Ring Mouse (see our review of one from several years back), a recent Cam Mouse (yes, a mouse-married-to-Webcam), and a Speaker Mouse that left us, erm, a bit skeptical. (See our Computex 2013 slideshow of Genius’ most recent mouse mergers.)

To us, the Energy Mouse made the most sense of the lot. Unlike most wireless mice, the Energy Mouse doesn’t use disposable or rechargeable AA or AAA cells. Here, Genius has equipped a slightly wider-than-normal mouse with a large internal lithium-polymer rechargeable battery. The internal cell powers the mouse for everyday use as a pointer, and it also acts as a power bank, a bucket of available juice for your gadgets. It's equipped with a micro-USB port and a full-size USB connector; you charge the mouse’s internal battery via one and attach your gadgets to be charged to the other.

When we wrote this in February 2014, we saw the Energy Mouse available widely online for around $30. Considering that, it’s a reasonably well-built mouse for the money. To be sure, it doesn't reach the heights of quality of the higher-end pointers in Microsoft’s or Logitech’s lines, nor anything like the gaming streamlines of a killer mouse from Razer or Roccat. And we’d be hard pressed to call this mouse truly mobile; it’s closer to the dimensions of a standard desktop mouse. But we challenge anyone to find a mobile mouse and a power bank that together would take up less room in your carry bag.

Design

The Energy Mouse is a wide, flat mouse that, in our test unit, came in a metallic-blue plastic shell. (Genius also offers the Energy Mouse in silver, metallic red, and pink.) The button layout is the standard for a productivity-centric pointer: left- and right-click in the usual places, with a scroll wheel you can click down as a third button—that’s it. No side buttons or shortcuts here, not even a simple thumb-activated “Back” button for Web browsing. In terms of buttons, it’s as basic as mice come these days.

The only departures from the norm are behind the scroll wheel. There, a curiously shaped, four-sided button lets you check the level of the internal battery. Pressing it lights up a series of four blue LEDs to the right of it, giving you a rough idea of the charge status.

More lights, of course, mean more juice.

The wheel itself has a nice scrolling action, with a crosshatched texture on its rubberized surface. The wheel doesn’t tilt-click like some Microsoft models' wheels do, but it has a “stepped” feel with well-spaced detents that allow for precise scrolling. Clicking the wheel straight down for the requisite third-button click requires a bit more pressure than on some competing mice we’ve used, but it’s not onerous.

The texture on the wheel matches that of the roughly triangular patch on the trailing edge of the mouse...

The patch is there to improve grippability for the Energy Mouse, creating some friction between the mouse and your palm. It works, but on our test unit, its gummy surface tended to attract dust.